But people blanche when I first suggest it, and I have to show them real results before they’ll try it themselves. And even then, they’re tentative. Scared.

Here’s a quick result from me: in the first two weeks after I launched my first email series, my sales from emails increased by 300%.

Since then, my results have carried on shooting through the roof – with no sign of tailing off.

Wouldn’t you like a piece of that?

Of course you would.

So let me dispel five common myths about email marketing for you. There’s loads of stuff out there written by so-called experts about email marketing that set out all the myths. Some of them are right; many are not.

This is the important stuff.

Myth #1: Nobody wants to receive marketing emails.

This is simply not true. What people don’t want to receive is really fancy BORING HTML newsletters full of pretty pictures and sales messages and light on relevant, useful, interesting content.

HTML emails and emails filled with images are Not Good when it comes to email marketing – despite what designers, ‘experts’ and email clients say.

Myth #2: People don’t like to be sold to.

Nobody likes a hard-sell, true. But to say that people don’t like being sold to at all is nonsense. You buy stuff, right? Well, to buy stuff, at some point you’ll have been sold to. Even if you didn’t realise it consciously.

And that, my friend, is the key to email marketing.

It’s the soft sell. You’ll have noticed that there’s no hard sell anywhere in my blog posts. Likewise, there’s never any hard sell in any of my email marketing. Everybody likes being sold to if it’s done in the right way – it helps us to make choices when we need to make purchases.

If your customers do mind being sold to, then you haven’t trained them to expect it, or you’ve got the wrong kind of people on your list.

Myth #3: If you email too often, you’ll be labelled a spammer.

Not so! In fact, if you email them most days (every day if you can) with interesting, informative and useful stuff then people will expect to see you in their inbox. And then, if you miss a day or are really late or something, they’ll email you to find out where you are. Seriously. It’s happened to me when I’ve missed a day.

But if you only ever email people a couple of times a month, when you have a new thingy to sell or a new offer to push, that’ll piss them off. That will make them think you’re spamming them.

Myth #4: Unsubscribes are bad.

On the contrary. As long as you’re targeting your sign-ups well and attracting mostly the kind of people you want to do business with, a small number of unsubscribes is a good thing.

Of course, if you’re getting tons of unsubscribes all the time, something’s going wrong and you need to look at it.

But a small number? It’s like a self-cleaning mechanism.

The people you don’t want to be doing business with will remove themselves from your life – without any effort on your part! So you won’t be wasting any time at all on people who are never going to be interested in your product. Good, eh?

Myth #5: Open rates are important.

Only to your ego.

Honestly, who cares? Email marketing ‘gurus’ are always banging on about open rates and engagement and other such nonsense.

All I care about is conversions – and you should too. That takes care of the ‘engagement’ aspect – if people aren’t engaging, they’re never going to convert anyway. What you want to be measuring is whether or not people are taking the actions you want them to when they read your emails.

Are they?

If they’re not, you should have a read of my book Business For Superheroes . It contains all the do’s and don’ts you need to get started.

Click here to get brilliant insights, hints, tips, do’s and don’ts delivered straight to your post box. It’s a tiny investment that could make you a lot of money.

PS Email marketing is the perfect 80/20 activity. Once you’ve set up your autoresponders and lead generation, it manages itself. It’ll bring in leads continually – with no further input from you other than a tweak here and there. Then you just need to fire off a quick email every couple of days. It’s really not hard once you get going. Try it.

TTFN,

Vicky

Vicky Fraser is a copywriter, author, and entrepreneur. She really did run away with the circus… but when she’s not swinging from a trapeze, she’s showing other copywriters and small business owners how to work with better clients, make more money, and stop missing bathtimes, first words, and dinners with angry partners. In fact, she wrote the book on it. Get your copy here.

I've been implementing your advice into this business and we worked out yesterday that the mailshots we've been sending out over the last 5 months have brought us in over £70,000 in sales. And our winter events are completely full, in advance, for the first time ever.

We have no website, no Facebook, no presence online at all - we still don't have a company name ffs. So our only source of advertising is through direct mail. Its taken me literally seconds to process the orders of customers responding to our mailshots, and they probably took 30 mins each to write. And they cost nothing. Not a bad investment for £70,000 return.

Boom.

Abby

P.S. Because we're so ahead, we've started to sell our 2016 season already (normally we start in January), currently we've sold around 33% of the events next year. Great head start. And that's all down to direct mail. I'm actually scared for when we DO get a company name and website, we can barely keep up as it is!